21W.747 (2)
Rhetoric, Assignment A2, Rhetorical Analysis
This essay assignment asks you to perform a rhetorical analysis.
Choose a speech given by a U.S. president or candidate for
president and analyze it, discussing its rhetorical dimensions,
their intended and unintentional functions, and their efficacy.
The greatest challenge of this essay is to find a thesis that
will motivate your rhetorical analysis. Your paper should not be
a list of the rhetorical devices employed in the text under
analysis, nor will it be adequate to show that the speech (or
other object) has some effective rhetoric and some ineffective
rhetoric. Rather, your essay must develop an insight into its
topic, a discovery that sheds new light on the rhetorical object
and on rhetoric itself. Your essay must teach its readers
something about the speech and the nature of rhetoric, something
challenging or subtle that they would not have known themselves
after looking at the same object. For instance, you might notice
that Bush provides much more detail about evil than about good
in one of his campaign speeches. Your essay could offer a theory
to explain this imbalance in terms of his personality or speech
writers or campaign strategy or audience, and then support that
theory by analyzing the specific rhetoric of the speech. (Note
that my hypothetical example does not specify the thesis of the
essay, which would be a claim about Bush’s personality or
campaign strategy or …. The thesis will depend on the particular
evidence available and your means of interpreting it.)
Speeches can be found in newspapers and on the web, in text,
video, and audio formats. You may choose any of these formats to
analyze. Lots of text speeches are available at the websites
listed in the “Links” in the Related Resources section.
You are also encouraged to seek out video or audio
speeches and to consider the appearance and sound of the
speaker. Please make sure that your essay indicates just what
object you are analyzing, and provides adequate citation
information for your reader to find the same object. You may
include the complete text of the speech or other object you
choose to analyze as an attachment with your draft, but
nevertheless you should not assume that your reader has the text
in front of her.
There is no length requirement for this essay, but I imagine an
effective rhetorical analysis as being around five pages. For
details of formatting, please refer to the syllabus section.
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Your essay’s ideal audience member is a thoughtful,
educated person, familiar with the candidates and the
campaign, but not familiar with your particular object of
analysis. As such, part of your job is to provide summary,
description, or quotations where appropriate, so your
reader can see what you are analyzing and check your claims
against her own intuitions.
Your purpose is to offer an original and engaging insight
into the rhetorical dimension of your object of analysis.
While argument is not the main mode of this essay, a claim
that is wholly obvious will not carry adequate motive to
ensure the relevance and interest of your essay. This
primary purpose or central insight suggests three secondary
purposes: to demonstrate something original about the
nature of rhetoric, to show how this candidate or campaign
employs rhetoric, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the
rhetoric in promoting the desired message.
Features of successful essays include
o A clearly stated and provocative insight into your
object of analysis,
o A thesis or problem that guides and motivates the
entire essay,
o Organized and flowing paragraphs that dig
progressively deeper into the central insight and the
rhetoric under analysis,
o Appeals to sound logic, critical intuition, and
defensible judgment,
o Original and insightful commentary that defends your
position while respecting its complexity,
o Informative and fair summary or other means of
presentation of the object of analysis, well
integrated into the essay’s flow,
o Careful selection of specific moments or elements of
your object of analysis, such that you make an
effective case for your central insight without
deliberately ignoring or eliding aspects of the text
under study,
o And clear, concise, accurate, correct prose with some
memorable phrasings.
Features of unsuccessful essays include
o Unclear, inaccurate, wordy, and/or incorrect prose,
o Dogmatic claims that are not critically examined,
o A central insight that is not especially insightful,
o Arguments that may be logical but that do not seem
intuitively plausible or ethically conscionable,
o Choppy, haphazard organization, no organization, or
paragraphs that constitute a list of claims without a
sense of progression,
o An essay that could be written for a high school class
in terms of sophistication of thought or language.
This essay will be submitted twice, first as a draft then as a
revision. The draft is due in class on Thursday, March 10. The
revision is due one week later, in class on Thursday, March 17.
In both cases, please submit an additional copy as an attachment
by e-mail on the due date. While the revision will determine the
bulk of the grade for this assignment, the draft should be no
less a submissible document. Both draft and revision should be
properly formatted, free from typos and from grammatical and
spelling errors, thorough, and complete. In short, edit.
Important Note: The feedback on this draft will come primarily
from your peers. On Thursday, March 10, please bring three
copies of your draft to class, one for me, and two for peer
editing. We will spend the day in class doing these peer edits.
On Friday, March 11, you will send me an e-mail briefly
outlining your plans for revising the essay.